


memento mori

by troubled



Category: DBSK | Tohoshinki | TVfXQ | TVXQ
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Mostly Hacked-Up Gibberish, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2019-11-05 00:17:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17908433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/troubled/pseuds/troubled
Summary: hell is empty and all the devils are here.yunho goes to churches. he finds something other than god.





	1. one

_Choose the easy way out,_  
_Take a knife, pick a poison,_  
 _Drink yourself into oblivion,_

 _‘Cause hell, baby, is your personal heaven_.

 

*

 

There’s blood on Yunho's hands. A stark shade of crimson and he's rubbed them raw. Try to wash everything under steaming water but it doesn't come off. Doesn’t disappear and he struggles to learn to live with it. Wake up in the morning, make coffee, scrape off imaginary blood from his palms, pretend he's not going crazy – every day routine, of course he can do it. _Of course_. He can smell the pungent odour, can taste copper coating his tongue like the cheap liquor Hojun loves too much.

When he sleeps, he hears screams instead of silences.

The screams get so loud he wonders if he’ll go deaf. If he’d still hear them when his eardrums have ruptured.

"Your eyebags are getting worse," Siwon points out one day. He buys Yunho lunch and says, "How can you take care of the town if you don’t take care of yourself?"

Yunho grimaces, but eats the sandwich offered when his stomach grumbles. He doesn’t tell Siwon about nightmares cutting his sleep into shreds. Siwon has enough to worry about; the brown files of unsolved cases sitting on his table like a pile of slumbering skeletons ( _murdered children decapitated women dead dead dead like he’ll be if he isn’t careful_ ).

So every Sunday, he goes into different churches and his car collects miles upon miles of empty roads through the desert. He slips inside confession booths and tells elaborate lies to unseen faces. He nods when mellow voices tell him ' _it’s okay, the Lord have mercy_ ' – sometimes he thinks about the dead and wonders if they have been offered mercy as well. But at the end of the day, he says ’ _thank you_ ’ as if he means it and steps out into sunlight with shadows in the curl of his lips.

And he'd return to the town full of ghosts ( _his, always his_ ).

 

*

 

"Drink with me," Hojun says every time Yunho drops by the bar. He plays love songs on a piano older than the town and his alcohol-stained fingers slip more than once. Jarring notes to accompany the distorted tilt of his smiles. "Why don’t you drink with me, Yun-ah?"

Yunho accepts the glass Hojun slides over the bartop but he doesn’t take a sip. He already has his own brand of suicide. "Why do you drink, hyung?"

Hojun laughs and his hands are heavy on Yunho's shoulder. Yunho doesn’t really know why (how) but he finds himself dancing (swaying) with Hojun in the middle of an empty bar, a silent waltz between upturned stools and polished wood. Hojun leads and Yunho follows, fingers digging indents into his waist. Yunho remembers the years when Hojun’s eyes were bright with promises and he's that little kid who followed the older boy into dark woods.

_Someday I’m gonna be famous, Yunho, and I’ll take you away from this shithole._

Yunho used to believe him.

But now Hojun drinks his way towards inevitable destruction and Yunho thinks he'd still follow him. Even in that march into hell.

"You can always ask me to stop," Hojun breathes into the crook of Yunho's neck. Yunho feels his smile, slow and tired, against the skin there and he holds him a little bit closer. The bottle of whiskey digs a sharp indent between Yunho's shoulder blades. "I would do it. For you."

And Yunho realises, once he'd escape that bar, that he still believes Hojun's empty promises.

 

*

 

There’s a low ache in Yunho’s belly, nervous energy rattling right underneath his skin. He’s being fucked with deep, slow strokes and his breath is sticky in his throat, struggling to drag through the tourniquet of belt around his neck. He needs to be fucked out, fucked so hard and rough to settle the chaos inside him, but he’s in no position to demand. The sheets are creased and scratchy under Yunho’s back, the bed smells of unwashed bodies and stale alcohol. Water stains spread across the ceiling like stagnant clouds and the curtains are tightly drawn so the shapes of their bodies are just outlines in the dark.

More secrets for him to keep, to bury.

Yunho keens in desperation, turning to stutters when the belt clinches a notch tighter.

“Shhh—” Sharp teeth graze his jaw and snaps at his ear, gnawing on the flesh. The cock slows, almost leisurely, and ragged nails dig into his sore nipples. He smells tar and sulphur and rotten things. “We don’t want them to hear you, now, do we?”

His fingers claw at the sheets. His lungs scream at him.

“You’ll be good, won’t you?”

 

*

 

Siwon stops by Yunho's office on his way out and he grins despite the dimming light in his eyes, the hunch of his shoulder. Yunho thinks everyone is growing old before their time and maybe he's just as exhausted. Siwon sits on the edge of the table and steals a sip from the cup of cold coffee, face pulling into a grimace because it’s too bitter. Yunho's been drinking his coffee black nowadays, to match whatever it is nesting inside the cavity of his chest.

"I’m getting nowhere."

Yunho tries to guess what Siwon is talking about and he realises Siwon hasn’t spoken to him lately. Yunho hasn’t seen him at all for the past few weeks and the town is just a small hole in the middle of nowhere. There's no place to hide. He touches Siwon's arm. "Are you okay?"

Siwon waves aside the concern. "Nah, I’m alright. It’s just— this case I’m working on."

 _Oh_. "Do you need help?"

Siwon laughs and nearly spills coffee over his untucked shirt. He used to dress to impress, one dapper suit after another (Yunho’s favourite is the robin blue he wore two years ago on his birthday). Now, Siwon doesn’t even shave. "Don’t we all?"

_Don’t we all?_

Yunho watches Siwon’s back as he walks out of the office and wonders if he sleeps at night.

 

*

 

It’s another Sunday and Yunho drives to this small town, a blurred circle at the edge of the map. He doesn’t really know what to expect, but his nightmares are getting worse and he really, really needs to escape. The voices in his head gets louder, especially when he's not distracted by work and Siwon’s lingering stares are making him restless (as if Siwon knows, as if he can hear them too). The church sits in a comfortable circle of well-kept buildings, quiet and solemn and Yunho hesitates for a second as he stares at the giant cross nailed over the entrance.

"Are you coming inside?"

The voice startles and surprises, and his hand twitches towards the gun he wears under his jacket. Something instinctive in his line of career and he frowns at the tall man in overcoat, dust settling over broad shoulders. The man steps through Yunho's silence and crosses the threshold, footsteps echoing across pews and stained glasses. It takes a few heartbeats, but Yunho follows like a lost sheep and the man is the only shepherd he can find (even if he might be led to the butcher, he follows). He disappears behind a door and Yunho is left alone in the aisle, watching dust motes floating over shards of pale sunlight.

There are angels on the windows, wings tinted with the colours of a rainbow.

When the man walks out again, Yunho decides that he doesn’t look like an ordinary priest. His eyes are too sharp, too dark when he looks at Yunho.

"You’re not from around here."

"Um, yes." Yunho offers a hand and the priest's palm is sandpaper rough, his grip tight and sure. "I’m here to confess, Father."

"Why?"

"—Excuse me?"

"Why are you confessing?"

Yunho opens his mouth and the priest smiles when he comes up empty.

He's often asked a ‘ _what_ ’ instead of a ' _why_ ’ – unprepared for the path to fork into somewhere dangerously unfamiliar.

"Come back when you know," the priest says. He reaches out to smooth a hand over the lapel of Yunho's coat. "Detective."

Yunho drives all the way back to his lovely little town with his head full of hymns, fingers curling tight and uneasy around the map.

 

*

 

There’s a petite old woman, wrapped in layers of kaftans, smiling down at him from her balcony as he gets out of his car. The apartment building is old, a relic from when the town was famous for its coal mines (instead of the mutilated and the dead) and the local municipal could afford a few flourishes. It’s not much, but the building is in better shape than the ones further down the street, where drug runners and junkies and whatever else masquerading as human have made a home inside their rundown walls. Yunho hefts a paper bag out of his back seat, locks the car and waves at her.

He’d taken pictures of her daughter-in-law the year before.

She was hacked into sixteen pieces and found inside a garbage bag stuck against the storm drain, her bright red hair a messy tangle among rotting intestines and chunks of flesh.

The old woman calls him Sooyoung sometimes.

“Son,” she calls from her perch, in the voice of a lifetime smoker. The kaftans flare out around her like a giant, colourful tent and he hears the faint jangling of her bangles when she moves closer to the railing. He stands there, looking up politely. Her cataract-cloudy eyes stare back at him. Lucid, for now. “I hear things. I sit in my chair— I sit in my chair and I hear things. Quiet things.”

Yunho blinks. His neck hurts from the angle.

“They tell me he’s coming.” Her thin, cracked lips curl into an absent smile. “He’s coming for you, son.”

 

*

 

**tbc**


	2. two

 

The precinct calls it the Murder Board.

Yunho stands before it, a mug of coffee steaming gently in his hand. It’s too early for anyone else to be in, except for those going off the graveyard shift, and it’s quiet enough for once that he gets to enjoy his own company. The board squats at the back of the room and is covered in photographs – countless, crowding against each other for space. His fingers trail over the glossy surfaces, over a dismembered body from a case upriver and the severed head of a fifteen year old boy who used to pitch for the local team and a girl in baby blue dress, half-buried in the corner of an abandoned barn. Unsolved cases, an entire cemetery’s worth of bodies.

_Look how many you’ve lost. How many you couldn’t save._

A clatter from the side distracts him for a half-second and when he returns to the board, Yunho blanches in horror.

The dead inside the photographs are looking straight at him.

Empty, lifeless eyes. Mouths hanging open as if their jaws have unhinged, blackened tongues lolling out.

The voices inside his head rise to a screeching, mournful choir.

“Yunho?”

He jerks violently and the mug shatters into porcelain pieces on the floor, coffee splattering his shoes and pants. He almost pulls out his service gun then and there. The only reason he doesn’t is because Siwon had gripped his arm, aborted the move. Fingers dig into fabric and skin, and Yunho bites back the urge to shove Siwon off. He exhales shakily and swallows down the bile at the back of his throat. His heart still hammers against his ribcage and he desperately tries to ignore the scent of charred human flesh stinging each inhale.

“You alright?” Siwon asks. There’s grey hair in his beard, Yunho notices. He still hasn’t shaved. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

_The dead. I’ve seen the dead and they’re calling for me._

“Y-Yeah. I’m good.”

Yunho frowns at the mess and drops to his knees to gather the larger pieces.

Siwon pats his shoulder. “Leave it. Someone called in a double homicide. We gotta go.”

 

*

 

“Why are you a cop?”

Siwon’s hand shifts on the steering. He keeps his eyes on the road, black on the other side of the windows. If he’s surprised by the question, he doesn’t show it. “To serve and protect.”

Yunho absently rubs a thumb over the badge he wears at his hip. “What if that isn’t enough?”

Siwon glances at Yunho. A sliver of dawn breaks through in their periphery, white and shining. “We’re doing our best.”

Yunho nods and looks out of the window.

_Yes. But what if that isn’t enough?_

 

*

 

Yunho steps out of the room, snapping latex gloves off of his hands and wishing he’d taken the day off. A pair of twins, skinned like cattle and left in their beds at the eve of their shared birthdays. His eyes linger on colourful crayon drawings of stick figures and houses and misshapen bright yellow suns tacked to the wall, before looking away. He navigates through the mass of uniforms swarming the place, nods at familiar faces. There’s a middle-aged couple sitting in the living room, Siwon talking to them in a quiet voice. Yunho offers a grim smile when they turn tear-stained faces at him. He plays the part of a sympathetic stranger perhaps a little too well, had done the same to other families before – you learn to couch condolences as prettily as wedding vows.

 _Everyone_ dies in this town.

He goes out for a breath of fresh air and finds himself in the backyard. The roiling sickness in his stomach eases up, slightly. There’s an inflatable pool near the patio, empty except for some toys thrown into it. A lone yellow duck lies on its side on the sparse grass and he knows it would be a good while before the parents remember to pack this all up into small boxes. Thrown out or given away, or kept in the basement along with the ghosts of their dead children. Some days, Yunho wishes he can just walk away. Get into his car, start the engine and drive through the desert until he finds the edge of the world. And then keeps driving, right into the endless dark.

Maybe then he’d finally find peace.

He’s toeing at the duck and debating lighting a cigarette when he notices someone standing by the white picket fence.

The priest.

Who stares at him, recognition in the dark of his eyes. Yunho glances over his shoulder at the house, where Siwon is still talking to the parents, and decides he has a few minutes to spare. He goes up to the priest, shoes sliding through dew-slick, manicured grass, and stops when he reaches the fence.

“Detective.”

“Father,” he says. There’s a crack in his voice he doesn’t expect, that leaves him feeling inexplicably embarrassed. “What are you doing here?”

“Visiting a friend just down the road. I heard about those poor boys.” His eyes flit to the house for a second and Changmin shakes his head. A hand is then offered, clean and well-manicured. “Shim Changmin.”

Yunho wipes his hand on his pants, thinks about the boys in their blood-soaked beds, before he accepts the handshake. “I’m Jung—”

“—Yunho.” Changmin’s grip tightens. Yunho fights to not flinch. “I know.”

 

*

 

Sometimes Yunho wakes up. He doesn’t realise he’s sleeping until he’s awake, and there’s sticky blood on his hands and face, or a thick cock spreading him open, or both. Everything snaps into perfect clarity and he panics and sobs and scrabbles, and then he’s someplace else, watching blood drip like beads of coloured oil from the shiny blade of a knife. He’s standing in front of a mirror, touching himself and the sin crawling under his skin. He writhes and gasps and opens his mouth into soundless screams, the warmth of his own blood moving like fabric over his fingers. He sinks into the quivering death throes, everything blurring like he’s being swung around by his neck.

Right before he wakes up again.

 

*

 

“I think I’m going crazy,” he tells his empty bedroom, the mirror on the opposite wall. He scrapes a hand over his face and looks to see if it comes away bloody.

His hand is clean.

The voices inside his head laugh.

 

*

 

They see each other again the week after.

It’s small mercy that Hojun isn’t at the bar. Yunho’s eyes stay on the glass in front of him, empty except for the dull smear of leftover whiskey in the bottom. He doesn’t remember drinking the mouthful, but his throat hurts and he’s feeling more than just a little lightheaded. Changmin runs the pad of his thumb through a trail of foam that’s sliding down the glass side of his beer bottle, before taking a sip.

Yunho watches the way Changmin’s throat work, the bob of his Adam’s apple, and he has to wrench his eyes away when he’s caught staring.

Changmin’s mouth quirks and Yunho flushes.

“Before—” he starts, stumbling over the word. His nails scratch into the wooden surface. “When we first met, you asked ‘why’.”

Changmin nods. His eyes are a beautiful warm shade of brown, except when the shadows catch him just right and then they’re not.

Yunho swallows.

“What did you mean?”

Changmin places the bottle down, looks at Yunho thoughtfully and says, “You’re lost.”

The rest of the world fades into mute monochrome, indistinct and hazy, while Changmin is painted in excruciating details: the exact shade of his eyes and the flicker of muscle in his jaw and the way his fingers span across the bar top, close to Yunho’s hand.

“You’re looking for absolution in the wrong place.” Changmin’s voice is a quiet, terrifying certainty and the blood going through Yunho’s veins ripples, like someone breathing over the surface of water. “You process everything by starting at the conclusion that you must save them, but that’s not how it works. Those sins are not yours to carry.”

He’s all spread open for Changmin, all the neat compartments of psychosis and nightmares, and he wonders if the priest is able to look into the murky depth of his soul. And see all the rotten things there, clawing at his seams.

“Yunho-sshi.” He raises his head, meets Changmin’s eyes and the slow curl of smile. “That is not your purpose.”

His glass is full of dark ember liquid when it shouldn’t have been and he brings it to his mouth, at loss of what to say. The glass hovers there, uncertain, but Changmin reaches out and gently tips the bottom of the glass upwards.

Yunho drinks.

 

*

 

He doesn’t remember how he arrived home. He wakes to his alarm clock, blindly groping over the bedside table to turn off the insistent beeping. He rolls to his back and stares at the ceiling, scrounging through vague recollection of the night before. Drinking when he shouldn’t, when he wouldn’t have, usually. Changmin’s quiet voice. Changmin’s eyes. Changmin’s smile.

Changmin’s ‘ _that is not your purpose._ ’

His hips throb and he looks down to see bruises darkening the skin there, fingers-shaped. His hand sweeps over the other half of the bed.

Empty, but still so, so warm.

 

*

 

The couch in the breakroom is an ancient, lumpy thing designed to discourage anyone from taking a nap on it. Yunho does it anyway and gets about twenty minutes before someone switches on the tv, the loud chatter of a talk show chasing him out of the room. He splashes water over his face and braces himself against the pill-white sink. When he looks into the mirror, he sees someone else looking back.

Gaunt and exhausted and unfamiliar.

Siwon watches him from the doorway. There’s a hardness in his countenance that Yunho doesn’t recognise and it makes him uneasy. “You should take some days off.”

Yunho grabs a handful of paper towels. “Can’t. You’ll miss me too much.”

“We’ll go together. Find us a beach, get some colour on you.” Siwon tries for a hearty laugh, but it sounds hollow. Put upon. They end up staring at each other, a few sinks apart. “It’ll do you good.”

“I’ll think about it,” is all Yunho says.

 

*

 

There’s a girl standing on the precipice of the old bank’s roof.

A crowd has already gathered in the parking lot, squinting against the watery yellow sun to where the girl’s silhouette is cut out of the grey sky. The long, black ribbons of her hair whip around her head in a frenzy, obscuring her face, but Yunho can tell that she’s crying. With each shudder racking through her slight figure, she’s closer to walking into thin air and plummeting down down _down_. The crowd seems to be getting impatient, as if this is nothing more than a spectator sport and they’re being made to wait for their entertainment.   

“Anyone id-ed her?”

“No idea,” one of the patrolmen says, scratching the back of his bulging neck. “We asked around, but our best bet’s that she ain’t local.”

Siwon frowns. “You think she rolled into town just to swandive off a building?”

The patrolman shrugs, looking about as interested in the whole procedure as he would watching a paint dry. Yunho asks him to clear out the civilians and the uniforms move begrudgingly, making half-hearted attempt at keeping the more stubborn ones away.

Siwon nudges Yunho’s elbow. “You’re better at telling them to live. Go on.”

It’s not something he does often, not as if they get regular jumpers. Yunho thinks about climbing the stairs to get closer. It’s better, more personal than trying to talk to her through a megaphone. He has to shoulder the door to the roof open, the hinges creaking off a thick layer of rust, and step over the few bars of rotted beams stacked across the doorway. When he introduces himself and asks for her name, she glances over her shoulder. He’s right; she is crying. He’s calculating the distance between them when she raises a hand. He stills, sees her mouth,

_Help me._

Right before she sways. And pitches forward.

Yunho’s aware of running towards her, grabbing at the empty space she’d left behind. Fingers closing around air, much much too late. He barely manages to stop himself from crossing over the edge and his stomach roils as he watches her land on the concrete with a sickening wet crunch, the wind carrying the sound to his ears. Someone in the lingering crowd screams and Yunho stumbles back, the back of a hand pressed over his mouth.

He makes his way down after a few minutes, shaky with grief, with helplessness. Wondering why he’s there if he couldn’t do anything. They’re already moving the body when he exits the building, leaving behind a pool of glistening red. Seeping into the cracks, like an offering to a forgotten god. The curve of a broken bottle snaps underfoot as Yunho moves outside; Siwon’s head jerks up instantly from where he’s leaning over the trunk of his car. He watches Yunho, jaw so tight his skull is like painted bone.

The flashes of red and blue from the ambulance make his nausea worse.

“Are you okay?” Siwon asks, steering him to the passenger seat. Yunho sits and buries his face in his hands, elbows on his thighs. Trying to keep himself from unravelling. Siwon’s kneeling before him, heedless of the dirt and gravel staining his expensive pants. “Yunho, there’s nothing you can do. You know that.”

Yunho’s throat contracts, squeezing tightly shut. “She didn’t have to die. I should’ve saved her.”

Siwon slowly peels Yunho’s hands from his face, holds them in his own hands and says, with a voice full of conviction, “It’s not your fault.”

Yunho wishes it’s as easy as believing those empty words.

 

*

 

He stays inside in his car, in the empty parking lot in front of his apartment building and watches the old lady watching him from her balcony. It’s been twenty minutes into this standstill and he’s still terrified of the things she might say. Her hair is windblown, tufts of soft white floating over her wrinkled, tanned face and colourful kaftans. She’s gripping the railing as if she’s also thinking about jumping.

_It wouldn’t take long, not for her._

Yunho inhales sharply and starts the car, reversing out of the lot in a screech of tyres.

 

*

 

There’s a thumb trenched into the hinge of his jaw, keeping his mouth open.

Yunho’s eyes are wet with tears, blurring out the face peering down at him into vague shapes and colours. He chokes when he tries to drag in a lungful of air, an underlying thickness of something black and burnt and wrong stripping the inside of his throat. The heat rolling off of the body pressing him down into the mattress ( _stiff polyester, another motel bed_ ) is unnatural and stifling, as if he’s standing too close to a furnace.

“You can’t save everyone,” it says, fond and amused. The grip on his jaw loosens, replaced by an almost tender caress over the bruise forming there. “You’re too weak, too _human_.”

He sees the girl from the roof. Half of her face smashed in, long black hair tangled in the red, pulpy mess. She’s reaching out to him with bent fingers, her ruined mouth a dark, endless maw.

"Say 'yes' and you can end all this suffering, wipe the slate clean. Start over. Wouldn't that be nice?"

_Help me._

 

*

 

The car is where he’d left it and he slides into the seat, as shaky as a junkie on withdrawal. His forehead presses against the top of the steering wheel and he buries his closed fist against his breastbone, breath hitching into dry sobs. Desperation is a razor dragging deep through the red, carotid parts of his soul until he feels too raw, hemorrhaging and lightheaded in the wake of it.

He feels like he should be screaming, but the words won’t come.

So he drives. All the way to the end of the world.

 

*

 

The church is dark. Empty.

Yunho steps out of his car, hesitates before squaring his shoulders. The doors are not locked and he lets himself inside, footsteps echoing in the cavernous quiet. Yunho tilts his head towards the stained glass and frowns when he finds it different from what he remembers. Gone are the winged angels; in their place is a singular caricature of a man, wrapped tightly in the sinuous curl of a giant snake. There’s a sword hanging over the man’s head and the setting sun paints everything in shades of fire. Murmur of voices crawl inside his head, filling in the silence with their incessant chatters and he presses the heel of a palm against his right eye, willing the noise to stop. Even for just a few minutes.

Changmin steps out from behind the altar, smiling as sweetly as salvation, and spreads his arms.

Yunho looks at him and shatters.

With voice as soft as a prayer, he says, “Yes.”

 

*

 

“Let him go.”

“Ah. If it isn’t the angelic express. Afraid you’ve already missed this stop, Old Testament.”

Siwon has his gun trained on Changmin. His eyes are so cold they might as well be marbles. He repeats, “Let him go.”

“Or what?” Changmin goads, his hand carding through Yunho’s sweat-slick hair. “Are you here to smite me?”

“I should.”

“You wish.” Changmin’s lips twist and curl into a smile that’s nothing but black-velvet malice. “You’re too late. Your beloved righteous man? He’s _ours_.”

Siwon makes a wounded noise and starts forward, eyes wide with horror.

Yunho has no idea what’s going on. He’s on his knees, arms wrapped tightly around himself as he rocks back and forth. His head hurts from all the screaming inside, feels like he’s being split apart, sternum cracked wide open as scorching liquid heat floods the cavity of his chest. This is a different kind of hurt, more terrible than anything else he’d ever experienced. He fractures inside, breaking little by little, the cracks spreading like spiderweb. Being deconstructed and born anew, piece by molten piece.

He’s vaguely aware of Siwon’s raised voice and Changmin’s laughter.

And then—

  
  
  
  


—then there’s silence.

 

*

 

Yunho’s bones are shrink-wrapped in cold, bladed light. It prickles sharply all over his skin and through the dissipating hurt, he can see Siwon. On his knees in the middle of the church, blood streaking down the side of his head and seeping into the collar of his shirt. White-hot brilliance outlined Siwon’s hunched shoulder, unfurling into wing-shaped tatters that simmer and slide indistinctly. He’s looking straight at Yunho and it’s sheer heartbreak, utter devastation carved into his face.

Changmin, still in his starched collar, stares at Yunho with polished black-china eyes and a red mouthful of teeth.

“Beautiful.”

Yunho doesn’t know what Changmin sees, but the praise sends delight curling down his spine in a lover’s caress. He flexes his fingers and the entire building shudders, creaks ominously.

“Yunho, stop-” Siwon hacks out, bloody spittle smearing down his chin. He tries to get back to his feet, before buckling under an invisible pressure. His white brilliance shivers in the hot, stagnant air, sliding off of him like oil slick. He reaches out, pleading. “Come back to me. Please, it’s not too late. Don’t do this. _Come back to us._ ”

Changmin flicks him a glance, disdainful.

“It’s okay, Siwonnie.” Yunho inhales deeply, the air settling inside his lungs hot and sulfurous. His eyes are clear; he’s finally able to see the world and all the shifting, straining ugliness of it. He aches to make everything right. To start over. “I’ll save everyone.”

That is his purpose, he knows it now.

 

*

 

The sun is just starting to rise when Yunho and Changmin step out of the church. Dawn painted in soft colours, pastels streaking across the wavering light outlining the surrounding buildings. Changmin catches Yunho’s shoulders and raises his other hand, fingers curled gently. With the second knuckle of his forefinger, he hooks the point of Yunho’s chin and tips his face up. Just half a degree. Just enough for it to be a show, instead of a scrutiny. Yunho’s head is turned this way and that, like he’s being appraised by a connoisseur.

He basks in the gentle ministration and Changmin’s pleased smile.

Lets Changmin kisses him, slow and sweet, as the sky turns hellfire red above their heads.

 

*

 

**end**

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i started off with the premise of demon!changmin and human!yunho. fuck knows how it turned vaguely biblical, instead of kinky sexy times. had fun writing this though. and now i’m going back to my grave. cheers.
> 
> [twitter](http://twitter.com/carnivrous) & [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/carnivrous)


End file.
